Computational Textual Analysis for Communication Research

4-None

This course provides an introduction to computational methods in textual analysis, specifically designed for those in the field of communication research. This course is practical and hands-on in nature and focuses on theoretical and empirical questions we can ask with text-as-data from a social science perspective and learn how to answer them. The course content covers data scraping, text data cleaning and preprocessing, dictionary-based analysis, unsupervised topic modeling, supervised text classification, the use of large language models, and techniques for effective visualization and reporting of findings. To follow this course, basic Python and R knowledge would be beneficial, but advanced programming skills are not required.